Wednesday, April 25, 2012

Redditor Cenodoxus explains how the Cold War era of Communist fear compares to Americas 'War on Terror.'

Nothing is so
irretrievably lost to a society as the sense of fear it felt about a
grave danger that was subsequently coped with. -- George Will.
Reddit's demographic skews young, and people here don't often have
the experience to be able to compare the modern "war on terror" to the
"war on communism." The truth of the matter is that the war on terror is
largely a peripheral concern in the United States, to a degree that
Americans between, say, 1950 and 1989 would have loved to have. (As an
aside, this is not to say that terrorism wasn't happening during the
exact same period -- airplane hijackings in particular were relatively
common during this forty-year period, and the thought process that
developed on how to handle them played its own sad role on 9/11 -- just
that it didn't filter to American cultural consciousness in a way that
the "Soviet threat" did.) Yes, you see it on the nightly news, and yes,
comedians make jokes about it and it informs both public and foreign
policy -- but not to anywhere near the extent that communism did.What the Americans saw: The USSR was, for at least a
portion of its history, an aggressively expansionist and often
foul-tempered entity with a largely opaque political process, a history
of "disappearing" dissidents, and a united cadre of communist nations to
back it up. Or at least, that was the American political establishment's experience with it.
With the opening of the Soviet archives, we know a lot more now about
the disagreements and infighting behind the scenes, and that what we
thought of as being an unstoppable and belligerent empire was anything
but. The Soviets didn't really want to go to war any more than we did
(of course, exceptions existed on both sides), and each nation thought
of the other as having all its ducks in a row and a united set of
allies. Nope. Disagreements between the Soviets and Chinese over what to
do about North Korea are pretty representative of stuff the Americans
didn't know. It turns out the Soviets were no fools about what Kim
il-Sung was up to and that they spent a lot of time trying to rein the
crazy in. It didn't work and they sorely regretted having put him (and
others around the world) in power, in much the same way that the
Americans came to regret having supported their own batch of crazies in
the interests of countering communism. Not as crazy as it looks: This all looks insane with
the benefit of 20+ years' worth of hindsight, but -- the more you study
the era and how politicians on both side acted and why they did, the
more you start to understand that, given the insanity of the time
itself, just about all parties involved were actually behaving pretty
rationally. The Soviets and Americans both behaved in a manner that made
perfect sense for how their nations saw the world and their place in
it. Or, to put it another way, look at the game theory governing mutual assured destruction.
The idea of mass war with nuclear weapons is insane, but how people
thought through it, and in essence, designed a system to prevent it, was
actually pretty smart. Also smart was how quickly people on both sides
recognized that the world was changing. I love to cite this article
from 1989 as an example of the almost creepy prescience with which the
U.S. military accurately predicted what it'd be doing today.The Cold War's effect on the American perspective:

Think about a forty year national nightmare with Soviet spies in the
American nuclear program, nuclear weapons being moved to Cuba and
within easy range of the continental United States (probably the closest
the two countries came to all-out war before Khrushchev blinked), the
"space race," and dick-swinging contests over Olympic athletes and
scientific and cultural accomplishments.

Think about Dead Hand
and the rivers of ink spilled by commenters, academics, and polemicists
for forty years about the potential for a Soviet-American War and what
it would look like.

Think about the German army's bald admission that it existed largely
for the purpose of slowing the Soviet tank advance in the event of an
invasion of western Europe.

It was something rather more all-consuming than the current "war on
terror." The modern CIA owes its existence to the USSR, as do
generations of American politicians and policymakers. Condoleeza Rice,
for example, is fluent in Russian, as are many in the State Department
around her age. There's been a mass scramble to reorient the CIA around
Chinese, Dari, Pashto, and Arabic lately. Hint, hint.
The world as a whole is safer and less violent than it's ever been,
to a degree I think very few people truly appreciate. And if you want my
honest opinion, future historians will see the modern "war on terror"
as an inevitable development of the post-colonial world. They, too, will
be writing in a period where that threat has passed and people are
largely insensible to why it informed politics and culture the way it
did. We are already starting to forget why the Cold War was as scary as
it was.